‘Diversity’ is such a broad-ranging term, so as to be completely unhelpful. Far from promoting individuality, it clumps together people who are gay, black, bisexual, disabled, but draws the line at being male or female. Critically defining diversity has some bearing on whether you wish diversity groups to be safely ringfenced; or whether all ‘diversity individuals’ should be represented at all levels of a corporate. Whether or not a partner, who has a diversity issue, has time to making diversity part of the corporate culture or not is a moot point, or whether she or he gets paid extra and keeps work for this to a minimum to prevent its negative impact on targets and billable earnings, etc.

Lessons can be learned from another area so beloved of corporate legal marketing and recruitment departments. A highly seminal article on the different subject of corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged from Porter and Kramer in 2006 in the Harvard Business Review. At this time, Porter and Kramer made a limited entrance into the discussion of CSR and corporate strategy, by structuring their discussion around reputation, sustainability / ‘people, planet, profit’, license-to-operate, and a few other associated issues. It is probably the article which has appeared from Harvard in 2011 that makes the most enduring impression of how CSR should be approached. Porter and Kramer introduce the notion of ‘creating shared value’, emphasising that a previous drawback of previous approaches – including their one – is that the corporation has been pitted against society. Of course, if the purpose of the company in English law is to maximise shareholder dividend, the issue of whether shareholders and directors have an alternative belief-set to other stakeholders becomes enormously relevant.

A similar criticism in my view can be made of the way that law firms approach disability. I am deciding not to hide this under the general term ‘diversity’. Michael Porter talks about the competitive advantage of businesses adopting CSR, such that your business is better than the competition. A lazy marketing solution would be to plaster your promotional literature with pictures of lawyers in wheelchairs, and get your firm to sign up to the aspirational but unenforceable Law Society Diversity and Inclusion Charter; and to concentrate on the profitability of your law firm instead. A more imaginative solution, in keeping with Porter and Kramer (2011), would be to acknowledge disabled individuals like myself as valued members of society. Whether or not you believe in multiculturalism, it is easily possible that a law firm, including the Magic Circle, could set up innovative professional legal services solutions regarding disability and employment issues in the corporate work force; they could make money out of this, indeed, and become more profitable in the process. More radical than making up numbers of the number of disabled candidates invited for interview, even.

I allude to this discussion briefly in a podcast I did with Alex Aldridge and Kevin Poulter this evening.